Turns a vague "who we sell to" into a weighted, filterable ICP scorecard - firmographics, technographics, and time-bound triggers expressed as literal Apollo or Sales Navigator filter values, built from closed-won and churned evidence, with hard disqualifiers and A/B/C account tiering - plus a buying-committee persona map covering economic buyer, champion, technical user, and blocker with each role's pains. Use when standing up outbound - FIRST, before any list-building or outreach - and someone asks "who is our ICP", "what filters do I put in Apollo", "we're targeting everyone and closing no one", or "score this account against our ICP". Do NOT use for pulling the actual prospect list - use prospect-list-builder instead - or for the messaging one-liner - use positioning-statement instead - or for end-user research personas - use user-persona instead.
---
name: icp-persona-builder
description: Turns a vague "who we sell to" into a weighted, filterable ICP scorecard - firmographics, technographics, and time-bound triggers expressed as literal Apollo or Sales Navigator filter values, built from closed-won and churned evidence, with hard disqualifiers and A/B/C account tiering - plus a buying-committee persona map covering economic buyer, champion, technical user, and blocker with each role's pains. Use when standing up outbound - FIRST, before any list-building or outreach - and someone asks "who is our ICP", "what filters do I put in Apollo", "we're targeting everyone and closing no one", or "score this account against our ICP". Do NOT use for pulling the actual prospect list - use prospect-list-builder instead - or for the messaging one-liner - use positioning-statement instead - or for end-user research personas - use user-persona instead.
---
# Build Your ICP & Buyer Personas
The core insight: an ICP is not a description, it is a **filter**. If you cannot type a criterion into Apollo, Sales Navigator, or a Clay table and get a finite list back, it is not part of your ICP - it is marketing prose. "Mid-market companies that value innovation" is useless. "US-based B2B SaaS, 50-500 employees, Series B+, using Salesforce + Segment, hiring SDRs" is a list you can build tomorrow. The most common trap is conflating the ICP (the *account* you target) with the persona (the *human* you email) and skipping the buying committee entirely - so reps email one champion who has no budget, or one economic buyer who has never felt the pain.
The second trap is building the ICP from aspiration instead of evidence. Your ICP is whoever already gets value and pays you, not whoever you wish would. Start from closed-won, not from the TAM slide. If you have fewer than ~10 closed deals, anchor on your best 3-5 customers by retention and expansion, and treat the result as a hypothesis to be falsified by [[buying-signal-tracker]] reply data.
## When to use this skill
- You are standing up outbound and have no documented, filterable target definition.
- Reps are spraying - pipeline is full of bad-fit deals that stall at procurement or "no budget."
- Reply rates are fine but win rates are bad: usually a persona/committee problem, not a copy problem.
- You're entering a new segment or launching a new product and need a fresh ICP hypothesis.
- You need to tier a raw account list A/B/C before and burn effort on it.
## The workflow
1. **Pull your evidence base first.** Export closed-won from the CRM. For each, record: industry, employee count, region, funding stage, the tools they ran, what triggered the deal, who signed, sales cycle length, and ACV. Also pull closed-LOST and churned - the disqualifiers hide there. Do NOT skip churned: a segment that buys fast and churns in 6 months is a *negative* ICP signal, not a win.
2. **Find the firmographic spine.** Look for the 3-5 attributes that separate won from lost. Express each as a literal filter value, not an adjective: `industry IN (B2B SaaS, fintech)`, `headcount 50-500`, `geo = US/CA`, `funding ≥ Series B`. If an attribute doesn't move win rate, cut it - every extra filter shrinks your list, so each one must earn its place.